


The Wildest Dreams of Wild Men

by novelized



Category: Good Will Hunting (1997)
Genre: First Time, Friendship, M/M, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-02-27 04:06:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2678411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novelized/pseuds/novelized
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will goes home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wildest Dreams of Wild Men

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Laura](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laura/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, Laura! Good Will Hunting is one of my favorite movies so I'm glad other people love it too. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> (Title and other quotes taken shamelessly from Henry David Thoreau's essay "Walking.")

Will has been driving for far too fucking long when he starts thinking about the sunset. He’s been chasing Massachusetts signs for sixty miles now, and chasing the idea of home for thousands of miles before that, living off cigarettes and gas station coffee and restless rest stop naps, and he’s thinking about Thoreau of all fucking people. The sun is slowly dipping below the trees behind him and setting everything on fire, and there were thousands of poems written about its majesty, all golds and glory, but it’s an essay that comes to mind: _He appears to migrate westward daily, and tempts us to follow him._

According to Thoreau, Will’s driving in the wrong direction. He’s still got three hours to change his mind, turn back towards California and the life he’s spent two years building. He imagines good old Henry David riding shotgun—(it really is a long fucking drive, it’s not the craziest thing he’s done)—and telling him to head for the Pacific, where the world is _more unexhausted and richer._ He thinks about all the sunsets he would catch full-on.

He keeps driving east. He’s always liked sunrises better, anyway.

-

He doesn’t know where to go once he gets there. He’s been living for ages in an apartment he’d never once considered home, but now he’s here, and he’s got no destination. Chuckie’d called him once, a few months after he’d left, told him he’d absentmindedly driven to Will’s old place, was halfway up the stairs when he remembered his ugly ass didn’t live there anymore, that there was an overturned bicycle on the sidewalk, a bunch of kid shit littered in the yard. He has a weird flickering desire to go see for himself, but what the fuck would that prove? That life in Southie moved on without him. That’s it.

He cuts a sharp left and aims for the place he knew, eventually, he’d end up.

-

Will knocks three times and then buries his hands deep inside his pockets, waiting. It’s fucking cold outside, but he’d come back with even less than he’d left with, and it’s not like he was going to do a little light shopping along the way. The paint around the door is peeling in long strips, and the dusty Christmas lights strung around the porch give the impression they’ve been there longer than they should’ve been. Will’s not even positive he still lives here, just thinks, hopes maybe, he’d have mentioned it if he didn’t.

(He can’t remember the last time they’d talked. Early fall, maybe, because that was when Skylar had started her overnight rotations, started sleeping through the day with heavy blackout curtains in their bedroom, when she’d poked her head into the hallway and shushed him because he was on the phone and laughing too loud. Talking to him was always like that. No matter how much time had passed, the bastard always had him laughing.)

The door creaks open.

Chuckie stares at him like he’s not sure he believes what he’s seeing, all messy hair and rumpled boxers, and Will hadn’t even bothered to check the time. It’s pitch black outside but Will’s had a fucked sleeping schedule for a week. He’s just now starting to think that maybe this wasn’t the best idea. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Chuckie says, not moving from the doorway, more curious than rude, but still pretty fucking rude, too. That’s Chuckie, anyway.

“Christmas caroling,” Will says, deadpan. “What’s your favorite? I’ll try to do it justice.”

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Chuckie repeats, dragging his hand through his hair like that’ll fully wake him up. Like Will will up and disappear when his eyes adjust to the light.

“You look like a Rudolph guy. Am I right, are you a Rudolph guy?”

“Jesus Christ, get in here,” Chuckie says, and steps aside to let him through. Will pulls the door shut behind him, glad for the blast of warmth, glad Chuckie’s mom is still apparently paying the heating bill. The place hasn’t changed much, but then, besides the shadow of scruff on his chin, Chuckie hasn’t changed much either. 

Chuckie starts towards the kitchen and Will trails after him, leans against the counter while he gets a pot of coffee going. “Seriously,” Chuckie says, trying again, rummaging through one of the cabinets for a chipped mug, “what're you doing in Boston, Will?”

Will fishes a cigarette out of his pocket, pats around for his lighter before realizing he’d left it in the car. Chuckie rolls his eyes and tosses him a crumpled matchbook. Will catches it one-handedly, lights up and takes a drag, blows the smoke into the air. If he didn’t know better this would’ve looked choreographed. If he didn’t know better he would’ve thought they were two guys who’d spent too much fucking time together, instead of spending two years fostering a childhood friendship over the phone. Will licks his lips and then says, finally, around the cigarette, “Put in for a job transfer.”

“You put in for a job transfer,” Chuckie repeats. “Is Skylar here? Is she going back to Harvard?”

Will didn’t realize how much he hated west coast accents until he was away from them. All of Skylar’s med school classmates, trust fund babies with god complexes, always asking if they’d met at _Harrrvard._ Skylar jumping in and saying yes, sort of, mostly, before moving on to the next subject. He didn’t fault her that; he never felt much like explaining it to them, either. They didn’t deserve the whole story. Right up until everything’d crumbled so much there was no longer a story to tell. 

“Nah,” Will says, and Chuckie looks at him and understands, immediately, more with a glance than what he could’ve understood in the next five hours of explaining. It is fucking good to be back.

“You can camp out on the couch,” Chuckie tells him, pouring a steaming cup of coffee and pushing it towards him, “but like hell I’m giving up my bed for your sorry ass, sob story or not.”

Will nods and accepts it. “Get my own place soon,” he says, cupping his hands around the mug, “once I get this job shit figured out.”

“Yeah, heard that one before.”

The truth is that Will had finally pulled his head out of his ass and taken a job in LA. A well-paying job. With benefits and other adult shit. The truth is that his wallet is padded enough that he could’ve spent the next few months sitting pretty at the Four Seasons. 

He’d way rather sleep in Chuckie’s shithole living room.

“I do expect the five-star treatment, though,” Will says. “Complimentary breakfast buffet. Housecleaning. Hot coffee every morning. A mint on my pillow every night.” 

“Put a mint on this,” Chuckie says, grabbing a handful of his dick and giving it a shake and goddamn, they could be seventeen again, young and exceptionally stupid. He throws the coffee pot back on the machine and starts for the stairs, passes by Will, tossels his hair with the hand he’d just been cupping his balls with. “I’m going back to bed. Wake me up again and I’ll fucking kick your ass.”

“Yeah, you need your beauty sleep,” Will says, but Chuckie just throws up a middle finger at him as he goes. 

He leans against the kitchen counter for a long time, sipping at his coffee, not even caring that it tastes like shit. Because what it really tastes like, mostly, is home.

-

Will spends most of the next day sleeping well into the afternoon and then padding around the house and waiting for Chuckie to get back. He finds a book behind the toilet—and that’s a fucking change of events, used to be just Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions in there—and reads that, makes himself a bologna sandwich, washes the cross-country grime off his body. Chuckie gets in a little after five, snowflakes dusting his hair, stomping his boots off by the front door. “You still here?” he says to Will. “Had a six-pack before bed last night, thought maybe you were just a drunk man’s apparition.”

“Apparition? That’s a fancy fucking word, where are you learning fancy words like that? Was it from the book you’re keeping behind the shitter?”

“Fuck you,” Chuckie says. “With you gone someone had to be the group intellect. Sure as hell wasn’t going to be Morgan or Billy.”

“Yeah, I guess not. What are those guys up to, anyway? Morgan ever get a job?”

“Yeah, Morgan got a job. Morgan gets a job every other week. Right now he’s doing dishes at some hole-in-the-wall place, I don’t know.” Chuckie strips his shirt off and tosses it aside, peels his socks off after that. “And Billy’s busy all the fucking time now, with the wedding shit and working for his grandpa or whatever.”

The words don’t even register for a second, but then they do, and Will stops and looks at him with his eyebrows raised high. “With the what? Wedding shit?”

“Yeah, he—" Realization dawns on Chuckie’s face. “Oh, shit, you didn’t know? Man, I thought I told you. Little while after you left he started shacking up with some Slummerville chick he met at a bar, and now they’re fucking getting married in the spring. He swears he didn’t knock her up, but I don’t know, man, she’s looking a little pudgy.” 

“Christ,” Will says, rubbing the bridge of his nose and trying not to imagine what else he might’ve missed. “Billy’s getting married.”

“We all thought you’d be the first, after you chased pussy all the way to California.” Chuckie holds his hands up in self-defense. “I’m sorry, was that too soon?”

“Yeah, you asshole, that was too soon.” Will moves towards him, swinging fists, and they trade punches the way they used to trade punches, shoving each other against the living room walls, hard but not hard enough to actually hurt, laughing as they duck and hit, hit and duck. At one point Chuckie takes Will’s knee out and they both collapse on the floor, rolling around and wrestling dirty like they did when they were kids.

It comes to a halt when Will takes an elbow to the crotch and he overexaggerates it, of course, makes a big fucking drama about it, and Chuckie laughs and pillows his head with his hands and waits for him to get over it. He does, eventually, and then he stretches out beside him, breathing a little heavily but feeling like he’s taking the first good breath he’s had in months.

-

“Holy shit! Holy shit! Will motherfucking Hunting!”

Will doesn’t need to turn around to know who it is; in hindsight, though, he _should’ve_ turned around because a second later he’s fucking t-boned by Morgan’s entire body, catapulting into him at a thousand miles an hour. “Jesus, Morgan,” he says, stumbling back a step or two, but Morgan catches him by the wrist to keep him upright. “Still as scrawny as ever I see, you ever going to hit puberty?”

“Fuck you, I hit puberty, like, ten years ago.”

“Yeah right, I’ve seen you shove Rogaine down your pants, praying for some hair to grow,” Chuckie says, coming back from the bar with a pitcher of beer. He pours everyone but Morgan a glass, and Morgan grumbles and whines about it, exactly like how it was two years ago, like not a fucking day had passed.

Except for Billy. Billy who doesn’t look any different, other than the way he holds himself, maybe. “Congratulations, you unlucky bastard,” Will says when he sees him, pulls him into a hug and claps him on the back a few times. “Can’t believe you’re willingly putting yourself through this, man, but if you’re happy…”

“I am,” Billy says, unabashedly, and Will can at least respect that. 

“I think this calls for something a little harder than beer, don’t you, Chuck?” Will says, already rifling through his pockets for a twenty.

Chuckie shrugs. “I’ve been drinking to his stupidity for months now, but if you’re treating, I won’t say no.” 

“I can’t do shots, man, I’m still hungover from three days ago,” Morgan complains. 

Chuckie whacks him on the back of the head as Will heads towards the bar. “Who said he was fuckin’ buying you one, anyway?”

-

Two hours and a seventy dollar bar tab later, Will is fucking wasted. He’s not alone in this: Billy’s facedown on the table, his breath fogging up the beer glass he’d abandoned every time he breathes out; Chuckie’s animatedly telling a story and slapping the table as he does it, upending a shotglass, once, and sending silverware to the floor at least three separate times; and Morgan’s just losing his shit, laughing his ass off at whatever Chuckie’s saying. Will stopped listening fifteen minutes ago, either because he’s heard the story before, or he knows Chuckie well enough that he knows how much he’s bullshitting.

The bartender’s an old friend of theirs from back when and he comes to the table at closing time, slaps Will on the back and says, “Glad to have you home, Hunting, now get the fuck outta my bar,” so they haul Billy up and out the door, into the freezing night air. 

Morgan jabbers the entire walk home (“like fuck I’m driving, last thing I need is a Statie bustin’ me for a DUI,” Chuckie says, and for a minute Will thinks, oh, shit, so this is growing up) and they drop Billy off first, dump him onto his couch unceremoniously, because his lady’s upstairs sleeping and hell hath no fury like a pissed off girlfriend from Somerville. They split ways with Morgan two blocks later, and then it’s just them, like it was in the beginning, drunk-ass idiots stumbling home in the dark. 

“You don’t fuckin’ do anything the proper way, do you?” Chuckie says, leaning against the porch railing a little unbalanced. He’s waving around a cigarette that he hasn’t brought up to his mouth in ages. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you did it. You take off without notice, and that’s great. But then you show up without notice too. They don’t have fuckin’ payphones in any of the states you passed on the way here?”

“They did,” Will says. How many times had he hovered by a telephone, too chickenshit to make the call? He should've known, though. It was Chuckie. Still Chuckie. “Didn’t want to waste a quarter on your sorry ass. Now open the goddamn door, my nuts are turning blue.”

Chuckie pushes his keys at him. "Don't know why I bother locking it, anyway. What's anyone going to steal, my ma's 1970s toaster?"

Inside, Will lets a long breath out and imagines it curling towards the ceiling like smoke. He can't tell if the floor's crooked or if he is. “God, I am shitfaced. Let me sleep in your room tonight, Chuckie. You take the couch. Fair’s fair.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, fair? How is that fair? This is my house, bitch. Sleep in your car if you don’t like it.”

“Race you for it,” Will says, and he takes off up the stairs, because he knows that steps are drunk-Chuckie’s biggest weakness, and sure enough, a second behind him he hears a crash and a tumble as Chuckie goes down hard. He laughs a little too loud and throws himself headfirst into Chuckie’s bed, careful not to breathe in through his nose, because who the hell knows when he last washed his sheets.

He’s halfway passed out when Chuckie appears in the doorway, sounds all pissy when he says, “I’m not taking the fucking couch, man, at least move your ass over —" and then he drops onto the mattress beside him, buries his face into a pillow, one of his feet dangling over the edge. Will had spent a solid year and a half sharing a bed with someone, and then less and less, until it’d petered down to almost never, until Will was spending most nights by himself, and he doesn’t even fucking care that it’s Chuckie; it’s nice to have a warm body beside him.

It’s nice not going to sleep alone.

-

Will wakes up to the worst fucking alarm clock he’s ever heard in his life, and a pounding headache behind his temples. He rolls over and flattens a pillow over his ears, doesn’t peek out again until he’s sure the buzzing has stopped, and for a second, a brief and whiskey-logged second, he expects to open his eyes and see Skylar shrugging into her hospital scrubs. It’s not Skylar, though. It's Chuckie stepping blearily into a pair of jeans, moving slowly, like he’s in pain.

“The fuck are you going?” Will grumbles, his throat bone-dry, the morning sun reflecting off freshly fallen snow and blasting in through the window. Maybe he was wrong. Sunrises, actually, are a giant crock of shit.

“Gotta be at the site by eight,” Chuckie says, just as gruff. He buttons his pants with stiff fingers and then reaches for a shirt. “I’ve got a job. You should look into it.”

Will rolls onto his back and lets his eyes close again. He hadn't been entirely honest with Chuckie; he hadn’t put in for a transfer. He never did anything with enough foresight. He’d walked in and quit, grabbed his shit, walked out. Didn’t think about what he’d do once he got here until he was already on the road. “Think you could get me on your team?”

A moment later Chuckie has Will by the neck of his shirt, pulling him off the pillow a few inches, bringing him face-to-face. Will can smell last night’s beer on his breath. “Don’t fucking start with that shit,” Chuckie says, all serious. “I’m glad you’re back, man, but that doesn’t mean things are going back to the way they were three years ago. You understand me? We’re not fucking playing this game.” 

Will shoves Chuckie away from him, straightens out his shirt. “Jesus, alright,” he says. “Fine, I’ll make a few phone calls, that make you happy?”

Chuckie smiles at him pleasantly, the shit-eating bastard, like nothing had even happened. “Thrilled. And maybe you could do a little grocery shopping today, there’s nothing but beer in the fridge.”

“What else could you possibly need?” Will says, but Chuckie’s already gone and out the door, clomping down the steps a lot more gracefully than how he’d come up them.

-

Will does hit up the Stop & Shop after a long shower and two cups of black coffee, and he actually grabs a grocery cart, which is ridiculous because used to be he’d never left with more than what he could carry under one arm. But he figures if he’s mooching off of Chuckie’s hospitality, the least he could do was stock the asshole’s pantry. He takes his time going down the aisles, snags stuff for sandwiches, a couple bags of chips, hamburger meat and frozen pizzas, Lucky Charms (his favorite) and Frosted Flakes (Chuck’s favorite), a dozen eggs, a gallon of milk, and, yes, cigarettes and beer, and by the time he gets to the checkout lane his cart is pretty fucking full. The cashier is a guy he went to high school with and they spend a few minutes shooting the shit, talking sports and girls and all their classmates who’re doing time, and then he asks where Will’s staying and he pauses, a second, before saying, “Not sure, yet, still trying to work that out.”

The guy asks about Chuckie and Morgan and Billy—“that dude’s marrying my girlfriend’s neighbor’s cousin, no shit”—before Will finally gets out of there, slaps him on the back and says it’s really good to see him, and he actually means it. In California he went two years without ever bumping into a familiar face, and here he can’t go two minutes. He can’t remember why he was willing to give that up, and he thinks that not Nietzsche, not Chaucer, not even Thoreau could’ve prepared him for the many faceted ways that love can fuck with your mind.

-

“Jesus Christ,” Chuckie says when he gets home that afternoon, staring into the fridge like he’d never seen it full before. He reaches for a can of beer, pauses, then goes for the milk instead. “I asked you to pick up a few things, not rob the store empty.”

“I think the typical response is thank you,” Will says, joining him from the living room, where he’d left Professor Lambeau’s phone number on a wrinkled post-it note beside the phone. It was the only lead he had, so far, and Lambeau had only seemed to hold a minor grudge against him, said he’d keep an eye out for him, so there was that. 

“I think the typical response is shut the fuck up and hand me a bowl,” Chuckie says back, and it’s kind of crazy that Will still knows exactly where to go to find them.

“Did you think that when you were this age you’d be eating cereal for dinner?”

“Who says this is dinner?” Chuckie pours himself a generous serving, then pushes the box across the counter. “This is my afternoon snack.” He takes a swig of milk straight out of the carton, something Will has seen him do a thousand times. His mom used to slap him upside the head for it. He kind of wishes she were here now. 

“That’s fucking gross, man, now I’m gonna have your spit all up in my Lucky Charms.” 

“I could put my spit in other places, if you wanted.”

That’s how they joke, how they used to joke, before they were trying to impress girls who didn’t find it funny. Will rolls his eyes and says, “Yeah, well, according to Morgan you haven’t been putting it anywhere else for a really long time.”

“The fuck does Morgan know?”

Morgan knows a lot, actually. Morgan hangs around the edges of conversations and comes slinking away with the lowdown on everyone and everything. Morgan’s like a fucking housewife when it comes to useless gossip, and he says that Chuckie hadn’t even tried getting cozy with a chick since last Christmas, and even that one had been a total fucking bust. But Will just shakes his head.

“We’re not all trying to put our dicks on lockdown,” Chuckie adds, sounding a little pissed.

Will pauses and then, because this is Chuckie and they've always been nothing if not painfully honest, he admits, “Yeah, my dick was definitely on lockdown.” He starts laughing a little about something that hadn’t ever seemed funny until now. “Not just from other girls, though, my dick was on lockdown from the world. My dick hasn’t seen daylight in months, man,” and after a long stretch of silence Chuckie starts laughing too.

“What the fuck do you mean?” he says incredulously. “You followed her out there, you gave up your fuckin’ life for her, you weren’t getting any?”

“I was at first, man,” Will says, sobering up a little. “I was getting laid so much it was almost painful. But then, you know, med school starts, and she’s tired all the fucking time, and then we weren’t even seeing each other, she’d go in before I got off, and I’d beg her for something, anything, and she —" He breaks off and starts laughing all over again, and he hasn’t laughed like this in ages, uncontained, and it’s contagious, or something, because Chuckie’s cracking up too.

“She what? What’d she do?”

“She bought me this—this fucking _plastic vagina_. I'm not kidding, it was all pink and lifelike—you stick your dick into it and it’s supposed to feel exactly like the real thing.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” Chuckie says breathlessly. “That is fucking grand. So—did it?”

Will collects himself, feels like he has to relearn that knot in his stomach that comes from a good long laugh, refamiliarize himself with the whole sensation. “There is _nothing_ like the real thing, brother,” he says frankly. He picks up his bowl of cereal, all milk-soggy now, and takes a big bite, chews and swallows, before adding, “But it might’ve been a pretty close second.”

-

It starts blizzarding around dusk that night, and they’d had every intention of going out until the snow gets so thick they can’t see past the front porch. Chuckie throws SportsCenter on instead and cracks open a six pack, and it’s just as good as being at a bar, anyway.

“Can’t believe we’re not fat yet,” Will comments, tearing into a bag of potato chips. “I’m just waiting for this shit to catch up with us. Gonna look like your Uncle Marty sooner or later.”

“I was fifty-fifty on you coming back with a beer belly,” Chuckie says. “Me, I do hard labor. I break my fucking back out there. But I figured you were sitting in some stuffy office all day, eating jellybeans out of the receptionist’s candy jar, getting take-out all the time. Course, I also didn’t think you’d come back for years and years.”

“Actually,” Will says, “the receptionist had peanut M&Ms, and those are a goddamn insult to candy everywhere, thank you.”

They drink and talk and watch recaps of yesterday’s Pats game and drink some more, and the hours wind down into nothing, and it’s always been like that here, like time’s a blink and you miss it phenomenon. Will’s buzzed but not wasted and stretched out on the lumpy couch, eventually, and Chuckie’s on the floor below him, back braced by the armrest, and the TV’s still on but they’re not paying attention to it. It’s been silent for a good few minutes when Chuckie lights up a cigarette and says, “So you ever gonna tell me the real reason you left?”

“What do you mean? I already told you.”

“No,” Chuck says, swinging around to look at him straight on, “no one leaves because their lady’s too tired to fuck. When your lady’s too tired to fuck you buy her a fuckin’ spa day or some shit like that, you don’t move across the fucking country.” 

When he was in California they’d talk on the phone probably every few weeks, and the conversations wouldn’t last too long, ten, maybe fifteen minutes. It wasn’t that they didn’t have a lot to say; it was that they knew each other so well that most of it didn’t need to be said. Chuckie knows him better than anyone ever has. Probably better than anyone ever could.

“You don’t want to hear the whole sad story,” Will mumbles, reaching for another beer. Chuckie slaps his hand away.

“If I didn’t want to know, I wouldn’t have asked. So what was it? What sent you running for the hills?”

Will takes in a deep breath. “Cotidie morimur,” he says, but that just draws an exasperated face out of Chuckie.

“Excuse me?”

“Cotidie morimur. You die every day. I read that shit in eighth grade but I didn’t start thinking about it until I was out there—don’t get me wrong, man, I was happy, for a long time I was happy, up until I realized that I wasn’t. You die a little bit every day. I’ve had this life dreamed up since I was a kid and none of it was fitting into the mold, waking up and putting a tie on, hundred degree weather, and no one cares about sports out there, not in a live-or-die way, and the guys at my office were okay fellas but they weren’t Morgans or Billys, you know, there was no one I really just clicked with, and the more I thought about it—and towards the end I thought about it all the time, I realized—" Will pauses, stares down at the shitty stained carpet, is pretty sure he put that stain there years ago. He finishes with a shrug, “—I realized that Skylar couldn’t be you.”

Chuckie doesn’t say anything, just looks at him, so Will’s quick to keep going:

“And I knew that it was—was self-sabotage, or something, that I had to stop making those comparisons, but cotidie morimur. If I’m dying I want to do it here in Southie. Skylar has her own dreams, and that’s fine. Two years ago you thought I was squandering mine, but man, I’m here to tell you, I wasn't. I’ll do the long division problems and I’ll bring home the bacon but my fucking life is here, Chuckie, and I was sick of pretending that it’s not.”

When Will looks up Chuckie’s still watching him, intensely, like he’s trying to see deep down into Will’s fucking soul. That’s something that’s never made him nervous before, but he is, now, and he doesn’t know why.

“Yeah,” Chuckie says, after a minute. “I realized it too, once you left. With you gone it was sort of like… what’s the point?”

If Will had a nickel for every time he’d asked himself that. What was the fucking point.

“You ever think—" Chuckie starts, but he cuts himself off, lets his thought trail away into nothing. He shakes his head, says, “Nevermind,” and they go back to not watching the TV.

-

Will didn’t even realize he’d fallen asleep on the couch until he wakes up to Chuckie climbing over him. “Scoot the fuck over,” he mumbles, squeezing into the tiny space between him and the cushions, his left arm coming to rest—because it had no other choice—on Will’s sternum. He thinks maybe Chuckie’s a little drunker than he’d realized, but then, maybe he is too.

-

He wakes up again at four o’clock in the morning with the weirdest fucking impulse he’s ever had. Chuckie’s still fast asleep, except more of his body is on more of Will’s body, now, legs overlapping, knee-to-shin and side-to-chest. He’s blowing warm breaths against Will’s neck and it sends prickles down his spine, but he won’t—he can’t—

Carefully he extracts himself from the sofa. Not-so-carefully he banishes himself to the floor.

-

When he wakes up the third and final time there’s sunlight streaming into the room, and something sizzling in the kitchen. He wipes last night’s blurriness out of his eyes and winces at what his back feels like after being subjected to the floor for hours, and then he carries himself into the kitchen where Chuckie’s at the stove, dish towel thrown over his shoulder, turning bacon with a fork.

“Now there’s a sight for sore fucking eyes,” Will says, coming up behind him. There’s a skillet full of scrambled eggs, too, and toast popping out of an ancient toaster. “You pick up a new hobby while I was gone? You turn into Martha freakin’ Stewart?” 

“Hey, you bought the shit, figured I might as well cook it.” Chuckie gestures towards one of the windows with a spatula, and Will goes to look. “Still comin’ down out there. Boss called me off, no point in going in today.”

“That’s good, isn’t it? Day to recover?”

Chuckie shrugs. “Day without pay,” he says, and Will remembers that feeling all too well. But what’s he gonna do, offer to throw Chuckie a bone? He’d laugh at him at best and sock him in the face at worst, because they weren’t—he wasn’t a fucking charity case. Will just nods a few times and then reaches for a piece of bacon, but Chuckie knocks his hand away, goddamn him, and says, “Make yourself useful if you wanna eat. Grab the plates.”

Will has to run one of the dishes under the faucet before he feels good enough about eating off of it, but whatever, he’s done worse. “So where’s your mom staying, anyway?” 

Chuckie rolls his eyes as he divvies up the bacon. “With her new boyfriend. Guy’s a loser but she seems happy, I guess, and I get all of this”—he splays his hand across the room—“to myself.”

“Til she kicks your ass out, anyway.”

“Til she kicks my ass out,” Chuckie agrees, and lifts his water glass to that.

They carry overfilled plates to the table and sit down, dig right in, and Will says through a mouthful of egg, “This is pretty fuckin’ good, Chuck. Who knew you had it in you?”

After breakfast, and abandoning their dirty dishes at the counter by the sink, Chuckie stands up and says, “C’mon. I gotta get outside.” 

“What do you mean, you gotta get outside? It’s negative two degrees out there.”

Chuckie lifts a challenging eyebrow at him. “Prissy California boy afraid of a little snow?” he says, and Will’s up and scrambling for his boots after that. He’s had to borrow one of Chuckie’s old coats, and it looks stupid on him, too tight in some places, too long in others, but it’s that or freeze to death. He takes one of Chuckie’s winter hats, too, and a pair of mismatched gloves, and he still doesn’t have any desire to venture into the fuckin’ tundra, but Chuckie does, and what’s he gonna do, not follow him?

The snow’s deep enough that he can’t even see where the stairs are, so he’s feeling his way down with his foot, kicking powder out of the way, and he makes it to solid ground before Chuckie says, from behind him, “Hey, Will—" and when he turns around to look at him he gets creamed in the face with a giant flying snowball.

He’s more mad at himself for not expecting it than anything else, but he’s already scooping up his revenge, packing it nice and tight before launching it at Chuckie’s stupid pompous smirk, and then it’s an all-out war from there. They pelt each other with snowballs for awhile until that doesn’t cut it, and then Will’s tackling him into a snowbank, shoving his face down with a snow-soaked glove, and then Chuckie’s flipping them over and stuffing big handfuls into the back of his coat, the cold biting at him all the way down to his ass, and they’re laughing the whole way through. Will’s pretty sure the neighbor kids are doing the exact same shit across the street, but he doesn’t care. Not about being immature, not about responsibilities, not about anything until Chuckie gets a glove in his waistband and crams a whole bunch of snow down there.

“Oh, shit, fuck you,” Will says, and what he means to do is retaliate, maybe knock Chuckie a good one upside the head. What he absolutely does not fucking mean to do is unconsciously roll his hips up into Chuckie’s hand, but he does. He goes still and rigid immediately after, prays to every Catholic saint in existence that Chuckie hadn’t noticed, but of course he did. Chuckie stops laughing and pulls his hand away and leans back on his knees. Fuck.

“I —" Will doesn’t even know how he could possibly fucking explain that, the abnormality of it, how his dick had been on high alert since he’d woken up in the middle of the night spooned against Chuckie’s body, and he wants to talk about chemical reactions, rattle on about the left anterior cingulate cortex, anything, but then Chuckie pulls his arm back and drives one last snowball straight into Will’s open mouth.

“I think I’ll call that one a win,” Chuckie says, stands up and dusts the snow off his pants. He heads back towards the house and Will lays in the snow for a little while longer, wondering if maybe it wouldn’t be easier just to let himself freeze.

-

When he finally makes it through the front door Chuckie’s in the kitchen again, slathering too much mayonnaise onto four slices of white bread. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Will says, trying to sound normal, like what’d just happened hadn’t happened. “We literally just finished eating.”

“Burned a lot of calories out there,” Chuckie says without turning around. He drops a big pile of turkey on top of each and then reaches for the cheese. “Gotta keep my strength up if I’m gonna keep whoopin’ your ass.” He slaps together two messy sandwiches and then hands one out to Will. 

Will’s not hungry, but he takes it. 

Chuckie, still not really looking at him, licks some excess mayonnaise off his fingers. “Think I’m gonna hop in the shower.” 

“With your sandwich?”

“Hey, I’m a man of many talents, pal.” 

Will’s pretty sure everything would be fine if Chuckie would meet his eyes, if they could choke out a joke about it and move on. He’d walked in on Chuckie jerkin’ it once when they were 15, a freeze frame of Porky’s on the VCR, but he’d just walked out again and for his birthday two weeks later got him a Porky’s poster to hang above his bed. This shit happened, right?

Chuckie takes a too-big bite out of his sandwich and heads for the stairs, and Will throws his back on the counter and starts peeling off layers of winter clothes, tosses it all haphazardly towards the broom closet they’d converted into a laundry room as the shower blasts on upstairs. He doesn’t know what to do now, thinks it’d be easier if there wasn’t a snow blockade outside, if he could get in his car and take off for a few hours and come back with a fifth of tequila and an unspoken apology, enough time for the air to clear. But like hell he’s going back out there, like hell he’s going to spend an hour digging his car out, only for it to be covered again in fifteen minutes.

There’s a noise from behind him.

He turns around and Chuckie’s standing in the doorway, stripped down to his boxers, one sock still on, disgruntled look on his face. So maybe it won’t be unspoken after all. Maybe Chuckie was so fucking weirded out by what was mostly just a minor incident that he couldn’t even finish getting undressed first. 

“Look, Chuck,” Will says, but Chuckie cuts him off, crosses the room and shoves Will up against the wall, hard, like he’s going to pound him right there in the kitchen. Will throws a hand up between them, because best friend or not he’s not going down without a fight, but Chuckie knocks it away, and just when Will readies himself for the first punch Chuckie grabs his face, forcefully, and kisses him.

Their mouths collide together too hard, messy and heated like there are hundreds of pent-up kisses behind it, Chuckie’s stubble dragging along his chin and fingers scraping against the sensitive skin below his ears. Will pushes him away roughly, draws in a long breath, Chuckie’s expression completely unreadable, and then he closes the distance between them again and, just as roughly, kisses him back.

They’ve done almost everything together but they’ve never done this, and Will’s surprised at how easy it is, how natural it feels, how Chuckie can bite down on his bottom lip like he somehow knows that’s what Will likes. How they can find a groove within seconds, even if that groove means bumping into cabinets, kissing hard enough to bruise, Will’s elbow knocking his breakfast plate off the counter and hearing it shatter on the floor below. Eventually Chuckie’s scrabbling for Will’s shirt, barely pulling away from his mouth long enough to get it up and over his head, and then it’s gone, and there’s warm skin against warm skin, and Chuckie’s breath in his ear.

“Christ,” Will groans when Chuckie’s fingers trace along the scar on his stomach, because he knows that like he knows the rest of him, doesn’t need explanations, and he can feel how hard Chuckie is against his thigh. Chuckie’s lips move south to explore his neck and he casually slides a hand over his boxers, palms him through the cloth, and Chuckie actually makes a quiet gasping sort of noise against his skin that’s hot, hotter than it has any right being, and he turns them around and pins Chuckie against the wall before sliding his hand in all the way, tightening his grip around him, falling into a rhythm that’s slow and steady and driving him batshit insane.

“You come back from California for this?” Chuckie asks, and now it’s his hips thrusting forward, his head tipped back and his breath pulled out of him in waves. “You been thinking about this a lot?” His voice goes even lower, then, and when he speaks it sends currents through Will’s entire body. “Cause I have. Fuck, Will, I have.” 

Chuckie’s always been the talker, not him, and Will just breathes out hard in reply, tries something with his wrist that he’s always liked, grins a little when he sees that Chuckie likes it too. He keeps at it until Chuckie can’t form sentences anymore, couldn’t even if he tried, until he’s a slow stream of cursing and panting into Will’s skin, until he finishes with Will’s name on his lips and comes down, after, hard.

“Jesus,” Chuckie says when his breathing’s back to normal, slumping back against the kitchen wall. He peels off his other sock and hands it to Will for clean up, then looks at Will’s mouth like he’s not sure what to do. “So—we gonna talk about this?” 

Will shrugs, and he’s still so hard that it hurts. “Rather not.”

Chuckie nods. “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” he says, and fumbles, thank god, for the button on his fly.

-

Afterwards they sit on the kitchen floor and share a cigarette, passing it back and forth between them, watch the snow fall quietly outside the window. Chuckie’s humming Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer under his breath and Will’s thinking about what Sean would say if he found out about this. Probably that he saw it coming. Probably that his behavior was indicative of internalized self-loathing, or some shit like that. Will’s still thinking about it when he tips his head towards the ceiling and listens for something upstairs. “I think you left the shower on,” he says, and Chuckie immediately pops up.

“Aw shit. My ma’s gonna kill me when she gets the water bill.”

Will snatches his arm before he can head for the bathroom, though, drags his words out a little, like he’s not trying to suggest anything in particular. “We could probably both use a shower.”

Chuckie sees through his bullshit immediately and rolls his eyes. “You wanna get in the shower with me just say you wanna get in the shower with me,” he says, sounding pretty fucking haughty for a guy who’d just come unglued under Will’s hand not ten minutes ago.

But Will’s cards are already laid out. He’s really got nothing to lose here. “I wanna get in the fucking shower with you,” he says seriously.

“Alright then.” Chuckie shoves his boxers down his hips, steps out of them so he’s completely naked, now, no shame in the world, and he moves for the staircase but then pauses abruptly mid-step. “But no funny business, ya hear?” he adds, poking a finger into Will’s chest, and goddamn him, Will can’t do anything but laugh.

-

As it turns out Lambeau lands him a pretty decent job at a lab in Cambridge, once he promises to look over some math problem he’s been working on for the last two months and swears he’s not gonna up and chase after a girl this time around. He doesn’t tell him that he’s pretty fucking content where he’s at, but he is. He and Chuck share the bed upstairs most nights, unless they’re too piss-drunk to make it up there, and Will buys new sheets when he’s at work—the only change he makes without asking.

A real estate catalog gets stuffed in the mailbox one morning and Will’s flipping through it at the table when Chuckie comes up behind him, leans casually against his back, says sort of off-handedly, or like he’s trying to sound off-hand, at least, “You know, Will, you might as well just stay here, I got the whole damn place to myself for now,” and Will tosses the magazine aside without even really thinking about it, and they fool around three times that day, the first time right there on the kitchen table with the sunlight streaming in around them.

The snow eventually clears out and they hit up old haunts with the guys, and nothing’s changed, nothing’s different, except for subtle touches and Will’s hand on the inside of Chuckie’s knee, sometimes, when they’re crammed into a tight booth at a noisy bar, and maybe a quick bathroom handjob three times max. They’re groomsmen in Billy’s wedding and Will meets with Sean for drinks, one day, and he doesn’t tell him about Chuckie but he gets the feeling just looking at him that he already fucking knows. 

He also finds that he really doesn’t care.

Thoreau, in that same old essay, talked about pursuing wild fancies, _which transcend the order of time and development_ and Will thinks he really hit the hammer on the head with that one. When he wakes up in the morning and Chuckie’s there, instead of an empty bed, when he comes home from work and Chuckie’s picked up his favorite meal from when he was ten, when they can alternate between kicking each other’s ass at basketball to—well, other ass things, he’s pretty positive there’s nothing more wild than this. Time and development be fucked. He’s good.


End file.
